"Serenity"

"Serenity" is a rare thing--a science fiction adventure movie for adults, or at least for teens and up. It's got a sophisticated plot, a cynical-but-noble worldview and emotional issues that show a certain level of maturity that most big-budget science fiction movies aren't allowed.

Writer/director Joss Whedon has a strength for dark, emotional storylines, and he brings a depth to the story of Malcolm Reynolds, captain of the ship Serenity, and his struggle between doing the right thing and just getting by in a galaxy that doesn't seem to have a place for him any longer. It's more ambitious in scope than "Firefly", the TV series on which it's based, but as a movie it doesn't have the space to give the rest of Reynolds' crew the kind of meaty storylines they might have received on the show. They're around as backup and color, but they don't really get to shine until the end of the film. The real stars are Mal Reynolds and River Tam, the telepathic teen who is on the run from the imperious Alliance government for something hidden deep in her brain they can't afford to get out.

The episodes of his TV shows directed by Whedon have always had a strong visual flair, usually with one or two film techniques that rise them above the normal look of television. He achieves basically the same effect with his feature film debut. "Serenity" opens with an impressive long tracking shot following Nathan Fillion's Captain Reynolds through the entirety of the ship that gives the movie its name, meeting and interacting with each member of his crew and setting the tone for what everyone's like and where this is going. The rest of the directing isn't quite as flashy and in places feels like it could be opened up more, as if Whedon is still so used to television that he has a challenge bringing the sensibility of film to the camerawork.

The story is terrific. It gets to be ambitious in places where "Firefly" couldn't, gets to resolve some questions that "Firefly" left unresolved, and gets to shake up the status quo of the ship in unexpected ways. It's important not to reveal too much about the plot itself because there are some great surprises that fans of the show may not see coming. We finally get to meet the "Reavers", interplanetary savages who are rumored to eat their victims alive, and we get a suavely impressive villain in the form of an Alliance operative without a name, who is driven by the belief that Malcolm Reynolds and River Tam must be destroyed for the sake of creating a better world.

"Serenity" isn't perfect and in places it betrays its TV series origins, but it's an exciting adventure movie that's a welcome change from the candy-colored toy tie-ins that are most sci-fi pictures. Go see it again and again.

Jeff

"Shining', the romantic comedy for the whole family

"Sometimes, what we need the most...

...is just around the corner."

"Shining", starring Jack Nicholson. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. See it with someone you love.

Jeff

My God, it's full of cars

Big Things: PROGRESSIONS at Ninth Art

Slackers, groupies and gangsters, oh my! PROGRESSIONS creators Jeff Coleman and Stephen Greenwood-Hyde step off the third-and-a-half rock from the sun, and into the Ninth Art spotlight.

We're the latest feature in the BIG THINGS article at comics culture and commentary site Ninth Art. "Big Things" focuses on up-and-coming creators and gives us a chance to show off our stuff.

:)

Jeff

ROLL BOUNCE

ROLL BOUNCE makes me feel like dancing. It's a terrific movie with good performances, great music and some fantastic roller-skating. After I got out of the theater I put the Jackson 5 on my iPod and shuffled and grooved down the street til I got home.

It's a summer comedy about a group of friends in the late 1970's who rule the roller rink in their part of town, til it shuts down and they're forced to skate uptown at the bigger, swankier Sweetwater rink where the competition suddenly gets a lot fiercer. They enter the Skate-Off against local roller-staking god Sweetness and his crew, who makes an entrance so dramatic even James Brown would be envious.

Bow Wow plays X, a teenager whose mother recently passed away. Chi McBride does a great job as his father who wears a suit, packs a briefcase and goes to the city every morning to look for work--not having told his family that he was laid off months earlier. There's a great feeling of hanging-out in the summer, relaxing during the day and having to run home when the street lights come on. There's also a pretty touching story about the family and how they cope with the loss of their mother.

It's got drama and comedy but the star of the movie is the roller-skating, set to a nonstop soundtrack of 70's funk and disco. Its structure is pretty solid formula but the performances are a lot of fun, the humor is light-hearted and entertaining, and combined with the groovy sounds and roller-skating dance moves it makes one of the best times I've had at the movies in weeks.

Jeff

For some reason, a giant rat

LORD OF WAR

LORD OF WAR is not an action movie. Its trailers play up the "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" aspect that Nicolas Cage jets around the world by day selling guns and being involved in dangerous world affairs, while his wife thinks he runs a respectable business. That's a pretty dramatic misrepresentation of the movie.

In reality it's a biographical drama, the story of one man's life and how he rationalizes or ignores the moral implications of becoming the world's best illegal arms dealer. It's a good performance by Cage with a witty, intelligent script that gives a two-decade crash course in international warfare and smuggling.

We meet Cage's character Yuri Orlov in New York's Little Odessa in the 1980's when he's a young man getting started in the business of selling guns. The film glosses over a lot of the specifics of how he learns about the business, how he gets involved in it, and what he specifically does to rise in the ranks. It deals with his rivalry with successful arms dealer Ian Holm, and shows the lengths he's willing to go to meet and romance the beautiful girl from his neighborhood who's now a world-famous model.

Cage does indeed jet around the world, but as long as he can help it, he steadfastly avoids being involved in the conflicts he facilitates. He's not a violent man himself, and when violence does intrude on his personal life, it's a pretty gruesome affair, both physically and emotionally. Jared Leto plays Cage's brother who starts off in the business with him but who knows that deep down, selling weapons of death to people kills you inside, even if you don't believe it yourself.

It's not a fun, whimsical thriller like it may seem from the trailers, but I found LORD OF WAR to be a smart, thoughful movie that was well-directed and well-acted.

Jeff

Today was a good day

So far today:

It's my birthday, I got a job, I'm back in touch with one old friend and another friend gave us some words of kind regard. I gotta say it was a good day.

So I'm 34 years old today. It constantly fascinates me that some people have anxiety over getting older. I had fun when I was younger too, but thinking about it, so many great things have happened to me in any given year that I couldn't imagine asking to turn back the clock to a time before they happened.

My sister Stacey has two children that are cute and smart and adorable, she has a great husband and she's practically a rock star at her job, they love her so much and she's so good at it. If I turned back the clock five years the kids wouldn't be born and Stacey's situation would be completely different.

Stephen and I have come a long way on Progressions, publishing hundreds of pages of comics and creating our first full-color graphic novel, setting up our proper website and making lots of friends in the business. If I turned back the clock seven years and I'd still be toiling at the Joe Kubert School, being taught narrative art by fat guys whose credentials consist of "cut bristol board for Adam Kubert in the basement of his father's school" and who spends most of every Monday's class drooling about how hot Buffy the Vampire Slayer looked on the latest episode.

I live in New York City, the greatest city on Earth. Turn back the clock ten years and I'd still be Austin, Texas, which--fair enough--is a great city, but I couldn't imgaine going back now. After spending two years in Paris from '89 to 91 I knew I was going to want to live in a big city. The bigger the better--New York, Paris, London, Hong Kong... plus the movies of Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola helped seal the deal and draw me to Manhattan.

I'm 34 now and I've come a long way in my art, studying cartooning, expression, narrative, black-and-white, color, iconography, rhythm, page layout, and just devoting almost every waking moment to absorbing ways of telling stories and communicating visually. Turn back 15 years and I was 19 years ago, with loads of passion and drive but it was all theory. Stephen and I were conceiving Progressions as a comic and we had a script written but I wasn't drawing it. And even after I moved back to Texas from Paris it would sitll take me several years to get started on my long-running minicomic effort "Drug Abuse Is Fun". That was basically a workshop for me to get in practice cartooning, until Stephen and I could find a way to start Progressions.

We didn't realize that the way you start Progressions is basically, to just "start Progressions". That simple, basic fact of life would take five or six more years to even occur to us. We're brilliant but we never claimed to be clever.

Turn back the clock twenty years and I'm in high school, and lord knows I could do without reliving that. In fact, in 1985, WATCHMEN hadn't even come out yet and rekindled the fire of profound narratives in my mind--I was still in the limbo between reading Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, Alpha Flight, drawing made-up superhero/funny animal/computer game parody comics like "Game Quak", and being introduced to comics like ZOT!, WATCHMEN, CEREBUS and THE SPIRIT. It was a fine place to be at the time, but not somewhere I'd want to go now.

So yes, I'm quite happy to be 34 and I pretty much feel like I'm in exactly where I'm supposed to be--things in my life are far from perfect but much progress has been made (no pun intended) and it's an exciting time to be alive.

I got a job. I'm still looking for something more permanent that can bring in some income while we develop Progressions, but I've got a temporary assignment starting on Monday that should last for about a month. I've been jobless for a while which has made it tough to get back in the game--employers tend to want things like "references" and answers to the question "what the hell have you been doing with your time?" I'd been working through a temp agency and I'd done a lot of interviews in the last few months, none of which had paid off. It was frustrating as hell and today I was in the process of making calls to every other agency I could find, looking for SOMEBODY who could place me, when they let me know this position was available.

Also today (late last night/early this morning) I got back in touch with one of the most talented people I know, Jeff Iftekarrudin. He's a songwriter, guitarist, budding billionaire and just all-around great guy. Check out his site and listen to some cool music.

And lastly, Kieron Gillen gave us a great writeup about Spark-Tower Wilson over at his blog. Kieron's a games journalist and comics writer with a thoughtful, intelligent style and a sensibility about pop (both "pop" as an independent concept and "pop music" on its own) that I dig. For a while I just thought of him as "the only other person in the world that knows who Shampoo are"*, but then we started communicating and I drew a story for him.
The story's called "Hit", it was one installment of a series of short standalone one-two comics punches. Strong, discrete concepts told in a few pages. Kieron has put our "Hit" collaboration back online for your edification and enjoyment.

Together with Charity Larrison, Kieron's also serializing a graphic novel: Busted Wonder, which is just beautiful and lyrical and quite a change of pace. Charming stuff and I can't wait to see where it goes.

*I just noticed that on Kieron's weblog the mouseover text for our page is a Shampoo quote. Nicely done, KG.

Jeff

What works and what doesn't

Realizing that trying to get people to stop buying book A to start buying yours (which is what happens when you rely on Diamond and the same indy friendly store list everyone else is using) is a suckers game and look to jump into new stores not normally known for stocking your type of fare but also beyond the DM into music and book stores.

Retailer Robert Scott posts some great commentary on small publishing at The Engine.

It's still early in our game for promoting Progressions, but we have enough experience with our own shortcomings from the past AND with the frustrations over waiting for a book you love that never comes out, that we are determined to get our business plans and promotional motor well-oiled before we invest in the full-scale publishing projects that we are looking forward to.

"If you always do what's always been done, you'll always get what's always been got."

Jeff

Spark-Tower Wilson video trailer

In celebration of the launch of Spark-Tower Wilson's Silent Song in October, we've created a video trailer for the story.

It's the first in a series of trailers that focus on what "Spark-Tower Wilson" is about: music and the blues, home and belonging, romance and love, and fathers and sons. This is our most sentimental story to date, which is why we call it an outerspace blues fable.

You can download the video trailer here:

Spark-Tower Wilson video trailer

High resolution version (9 MB WMV)
Low resolution version (2 MB WMV)

Enjoy!

Jeff

Seen on THE ENGINE

Okay, now THIS is funny. (Must be registered to view.)

Jeff

Hey there! A while back while I was doing one of my rare bits of browsing, I came across a site dedicated to pre-code comics covers... check it out at www.samuelsdesign.com/comics

Superhero, war, romance, crime, horror, Ben Samuels has it all, and his site sports several galleries of brilliant images from the days before the code killed off American comics. This is probably my favourite cover of them all, but it leaves me with one burning question - how the hell can you have an anarcho dictator in the first place? The "of death" makes sense...

What is Spark-Tower Music?

Run-down industrial areas and their tired residential adjuncts. The neighbourhood where everyone knows everyone. The look that’s given to an outsider coming in, the look that’s given to an insider who’s leaving…

The blues. The feeling of leaving home. The implacable intrusion of adulthood into a young man’s relationship with his father. The romance against which all the odds are stacked…

That's Spark-Tower Music...

It was Winter of 2003...

I was visiting my family in Austin, Texas, and my sister Stacey invited me to a party at the lakehouse of a friend. The house was nestled into some deep woods beyond some twisty little gravel path. We were a small group and we ended up outside near the house, in a circle around a campfire.

We had a guitar and two of us passed it back and forth, playing songs and singing, showing each other what we could do and taking requests. He played country-inflected tunes with a twisted sense of humor and a beautiful voice. I played folk and pop songs ad some Brazilian bossanova--Dylan, The Cure, Antonio Carlos Jobim. My jazz chords impressed him, even though I only knew a couple of tunes in that style. His voice and songwriting impresed me--he played almost entirely originals.

I've played guitar since I was a senior in high school, and one of my favorite things to do is to sit with a group of friends and play. Sadly, it seemed to be a lot more common in Austin than it is in New York City--I can count on one hand the number of times it's happened since I moved up here seven years ago. I miss it.

Music is one of the most important themes in "Spark-Tower Wilson", and in the lives of millions of people. Do you have a live music story? A concert that changed your life? A friend or lover who wrote a song about you?

Tell us about it! Leave a comment below and let us know about how live music has touched your life.

In the meantime, here is the video trailer for Spark-Tower Wilson's Silent Song. It's 11 MB in the Windows Media Viewer format.

Jeff

BreakAway

Heard from Stephen today. We're doing a promotion for a club night at a local bar in Derby, with fliers and a series of posters. The fliers got back from the printers and the first posters should be going up this weekend!

Here's the flier:





We're excited to be working with Ed Sears on these promotions, he's got some great ideas for getting people into the event.

Jeff

THE EXORCISM OF EMILY ROSE

I'm not sure what the inspiration was behind doing another movie about the exorcism of a young girl. Sure, it was 'based on a true story' and so on, but THE EXORCIST already did pretty much everything you could want from that kind of tale.

The main reason I went to see it was a few scenes from the trailer which looked nice and spooky: the girl walking down the street and seeing people's faces seem to "bleed" black and become misshapen ghostly figures. I liked that, it was something that would scare me and I couldn't remember seeing anything like that in movies before.

Unfortunately, aside from a few viscerally creepy images, the movie was pretty forgettable to me. They made some odd choices with the story--it's based on a trial of the priest who performed the failed exorcism of this 19-year-old girl, who died soon after. As a result the actual title character of Emily Rose has no personality at all, you basically never see her when she's not frothing at the mouth, contorting into painful-looking shapes, or shouting obscenities in various archaic languages. There's no sense of empathy with her because you never get to know her at all.

The actual main character is the lawyer who takes the priest's case, a hotshot attorney who has just gotten a murderer off the hook with her amazing lawyering skills. The prosecution makes the case for the girl's medical condition, and the defense attempts to make the case for possession. The courtroom antics aren't very interesting and the ending makes absolutely no sense to me--I don't know much about courtroom procedure but they should have explained what happened a bit more.

I'd recommend even dedicated horror fans to give this a miss, it's a lackluster courtroom drama pretending to be supernatural horror, and not really succeeding at either.

Jeff

Abandoned bear

De La Vega shop opens

De La Vega is a painter and graffiti artist from Spanish Harlem who has been drawing slogans and cartoons in chalk on the sidewalks for years--he was doing it when I moved to New York in 98 or so and he's still doing it!

Not quite Keith Haring, not quite Jean-Michel Basquiat and not quite Jenny Holzer, he's got elements of all those artists and more.

I was heading down St. Mark's Place toward Tompkins Square Park tonight and noticed that there is a De La Vega shop now on the block by the park, selling shirts, books, paintings and other artworks with De La Vega's slogans and drawings on them.

Fate is weird, isn't it? Haring's shop is closing down and De La Vega's shop is opening up.

Jeff

TRANSPORTER 2

TRANSPORTER 2 is almost sublimely ridiculous. It's pretty much 100% schlock, poorly-directed and with hands-down the worst sense of continuity in any movie I can remember seeing. The plot makes very little sense, and every five minutes or so there is SOMETHING that will make you say "What the hell?"

That's part of what little charm the movie has. As a fan of martial arts movies, and a veteran viewer of some pretty rotten but watchable movies, I enjoyed TRANSPORTER 2 a hell of a lot more than, for example, THE ISLAND. Jason Statham is believable to me as a quiet tough guy who never makes a promise he can't keep.

The laws of physics in this film are more consistently ignored than in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Sometimes it's funny, sometimes it's kinda cool, most of the time it just brought me out of the movie because of how over-the-top it was. I'm all for wild and crazy mind-blowing stunts in an action film, but one of the things that makes action exciting is when it's grounded in a believable physical world.

The first TRANSPORTER was directed by Corey Yuen aka Yuen Kwai, a Hong Kong stuntman-turned-director who went to the same Peking Opera school as Jackie Chan when they were young kids. I like Corey Yuen as a director, because he's made some of my favorite Hong Kong movies, including YES MADAM starring Michelle Yeoh and FONG SAI-YUK starring Jet Li. Corey Yuen does the action choreography in TRANSPORTER 2, so the martial arts is the most entertaining part, and there's always some clever little bits in each fight that are fun to watch. It's ironic that in a movie about a guy who drives really well, the driving is pretty lame.

I wouldn't recommend seeing TRANSPORTER 2 unless you have a serious jones for a martial arts action movie and can stomach a lot of crap in between the fights :)

"Skyline"

"Skyline" 


The latest story at www.progressions.org is "Skyline"!

I've just updated the Authors' Notes for it, by Stephen:

We’ve always considered Progressions to be kind of a playground of ideas and genres to be mixed and matched at will rather than “an sf comic” or any such thing. It’s about the range of characters as much as the individuals – having adventures and fights and acting up and everything, but in large measure just living their lives, letting the more out there shit spin off naturally from what they’re like, who they are, where they are, how and why...

Jeff